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The effect of ICT on financial sector development in Africa: does regulatory quality matter?

The moderating role of regulatory quality in the relationship between ICT and financial development in Africa is investigated in this study. We employ data from 38 African countries from 2003 to 2020. For the analysis, a two-step system GMM is used. Our findings demonstrate that ICT and regulatory quality are essential for financial development. The net effect of ICT and regulatory quality on financial development is positive, implying that regulatory quality moderates upwards the nexus between ICT and financial development. 

The journal was written by Isiaka Akande Raifu, Ismaila Adeleye Okunoye and Alarudeen Aminu

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Climate agreements and carbon intensity: Towards increased production efficiency and technical progress?

Dozens of studies point to evidence of significant reductions in carbon emissions driven by climate agreements, such as the Paris climate agreement. However, these studies fail to answer a pertinent question, that is, are global carbon emission reductions due to reduced production activities or are production processes becoming more efficient as less carbon is emitted per unit output due to technical progress? Such an understanding is important to evaluate the tension between environmental quality and economic growth. 

This journal was first published on Science Direct by David Iheke Okorie and Presley K. Wesseh Jr

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Can Information Communication Technology Unlock Tax Revenue Mobilization in Sub Saharan Africa

This study examines the effect of ICT on tax revenue mobilisation in 23 sub-Saharan African countries between 2000 and 2020. To address our objectives, it utilises a feasible generalised least squares approach that accounts for both heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation challenges. Particularly, six measures of ICT (import of ICT goods, export of ICT goods, ICT trade, internet penetration, mobile phone penetration, and aggregate ICT index) and six tax measures (total tax, direct tax, indirect tax, taxes on income, profit, and capital gains, taxes on goods and services, and taxes on international trade) are explored in the study.

This article was first published by the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) Journal of Economics and Sustainable Growth.

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Cryptocurrency spectrum and 2020 pandemic: Contagion analysis

While several studies evaluate the impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic on different markets, it is worth the while to also examine its contagion (fractal) effect on the top (based on their market capitalization) twenty cryptocurrency markets. These cryptocurrency markets’ information (return and volatility) were sampled for both the ex-ante and ex-post coronavirus outbreak periods for this event study analysis. The detrended cross-correlation approaches are employed for both the main and robustness analyses. The results are robust and confirm a significant fractal contagion effect of the pandemic on the cryptocurrency space through their return and volatility. The contagion effect is relatively stronger for the crypto markets’ volatilities compared to the returns, nonetheless. Hence, this study supports the contagious effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the cryptocurrency markets and its policy implications for investors in the crypto space.

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Attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): New Evidence on Foreign aid and the “Bundling” of Domestic Revenue Mobilization in Sub-Saharan Africa

With the global sustainable development goals, it has become imperative for developing countries, especially sub-Saharan African countries, to think inward on ways to increase domestically mobilized revenue. The recovery of the global economy within the last few years has increased foreign assistance inflow into African countries. However, the direction of its impact on domestic mobilized revenue is unclear. This study revisited the relationship between foreign aid and domestic mobilized revenues for 32 sub-Saharan African countries using a more recent and novel dataset on tax revenue.

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